The doubt you feel may be an accurate reading of a biased room, not a defect in you

Conventional advice tends to arrive sounding soft and sensible. You feel out of place in a room you legitimately earned, so the trouble must be how you talk to yourself. Find a coach. Start a file of your wins. Tell yourself you belong until it sticks. Clinicians and career advisers lump all of this under imposter syndrome, and most women running large teams have heard the phrase aimed at them.

The trouble with that phrase is that the unease you feel in those meetings often isn't a glitch inside you. It's a fair reading of how the people around you are responding, and labeling it a personal defect points you toward repairing the wrong thing.

1. That label names an emotion rather than something happening at the office.

In a 2021 Harvard Business Review piece titled "Stop Telling Women They Have Imposter Syndrome," Tulshyan and Burey argued that the diagnosis takes a problem in how people are received at work and moves it into the individual. Once it sits inside you, the cost of fixing it lands on you, and the setting stays unchanged.

2. The room is in fact treating you differently

According to the 2025 Women in the Workplace study by McKinsey and LeanIn, female leaders are mistaken for junior staff at double the rate of male leaders. A Deloitte survey of 7,500 women across 15 countries in 2025 found that 28% had experienced microaggressions in the previous year. If you walk into a meeting in Summerlin or downtown and sense that people aren't sure you belong at the table, that sensation isn't a distortion. Some of them really aren't sure. Trusting your sense of what is happening in the room is the right instinct.

3. Were self-assurance the root issue, then coaching alone would have eliminated the disparity by now.

That same McKinsey and LeanIn research reports that when 100 men move up to manager, 93 women do, and among women of color the figure falls to 74. It also shows the gap in who wants the promotion is small, 80% of women against 86% of men, and that it shrinks when women receive the same backing men do. Had lack of confidence been the real problem, switching managers would not have made it vanish. A support shortfall does.

Where earlier guidance still applies

Some doubt is simply new-job doubt, and it can be useful. The first ninety days in a bigger role should feel a little unsteady. Maintaining a log of your achievements is a sound practice. Catching the feeling in the first place is fine; the slip comes later. Going wrong happens when you treat the feeling as proof that you are at fault.

Better move

The next time that feeling surfaces, check it against two columns. Under the first column, list the specific thing you think you got wrong. In column two, write what the room did. If column one is empty and column two reads "called me by the admin's name" or "my idea landed when he repeated it," you don't have a syndrome. You have evidence.

Then state that evidence aloud, once, to one person who can do something about it. "My recommendation picked up momentum in Summerlin after Tom repeated it back." "Next time, I'd like to be the person who makes that presentation." Saying this is not a grievance. It's a correction, made where corrections get made. Across Las Vegas, from Henderson to North Las Vegas, that conversation is available to any woman willing to have it.

Therefore, when someone attaches that label to you, begin by asking what the room is actually doing that produced this reaction in you.